Posts Tagged ‘WISE’

WISE – the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, a mission to perform an all sky survey from 3.5 to 23 microns – has successfully launched and separated from the launch vehicle. Having gone through this stressful experience for the Herschel and Planck launch in May I know how good the WISE team must be feeling at this point!

Next week will see the first science releases from Herschel at a big ESA press and science event in Madrid. There will be lots of exciting new science results and some stunning new images to look at. We’ll do our best to cover things here, but also look at all the other usual sources of information like ESA, the BBC and Cardiff’s SPIRE webpages.

Meanwhile, on a more local, UK scale, we’re having a week of ups and downs. Wednesday’s ‘pre-budget report’ announced £600 Million of cuts to ‘higher education, science and research budgets’ which is going to be really painful for the UK academic community. Late yesterday some possibly better news came in with the announcement of the formation of a UK space agency. It’s unclear what form this agency will take, how it will be funded or what it will spend its money on, but it is clear that Space in general is getting a higher profile in government than it has previously had, and its contribution to the UK economy is at last being recognised.

Elsewhere, there are some great new images from UK’s new VISTA telescope, and the launch of the WISE infrared survey satellite is eagerly awaited.